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POP PARABLES FOR KIDS:
BILL MANTLO'S MICRONAUTS & ROM

Maybe it's just a sentimental thing from my youth, but I have a soft spot in my head for Bill Mantlo. At least on his two Marvel toy books about genocide, ROM and MICRONAUTS. You have to understand that picking up on his admittedly heavy-handed metaphors led me to my fascination with history since, particularly the history of atrocities, totalitarians, and just in general what evil governments are capable of. I think MICRONAUTS in particular is a weird, but interesting comment, brought down to a child's level, on, of all things, class struggle. I'm thinking of Baron Karza, the wealthy of Homeworld, and the Body Banks. (and Karza was always a much better villain than Darth Vader, whom he was stolen from-an actual personality rather than just a menacing presence that was sort of Stalin and Hitler at the same time, combined with Dr. Doom. Like Doom with a whole universe to play with)

Which also seems to be lifted a bit from COMA, but a lot of things were at the time-that damn Michael Crichton's been making things people make references to for about, what, three or four decades now. But that's another thing: it's redolent of 70s paranoid SF, and if you compare it to GALACTICA(the original, stupid one-which nevertheless, at least in Walt Simonson's hands, became kind of a cool comic) or BUCK ROGERS or any other form of serial SF in other pop media outside of movies at the time, it's much better and more intelligent. Though with BUCK ROGERS that's not hard.

It also shares the scrappy-revels-against-the-big -empire meme derived from the Vietnam War with STAR WARS. (though the place in SW where that particularly is evident, embarrassingly, is the Ewoks)

ROM is an odd thing and seems to be coming more from the Reagan transition than from a post-WW2 type of tone. There's a revival of the paranoid 50s fear of invasion-sublimated into aliens-the idea of an "enemy within" that looks like everyone else, and a compacent, trusting population that does not believe the Brave One With the Truth figure, ROM, and allow the evil deceivers to prosper. (I did always dig Sal Buscema on this one book, particularly when the Wraiths smirked) It's odd because what I just described is the typical structure of a Nazi-era German film as delineated in the book ENTERTAINING THE THIRD REICH. In some ways, and I'm sure this is unintentional, ROM is sort of a romanticized Einsatzgruppen troop. You even have an example of what horrible things happens

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